Register Change in the British and Australian Hansard (1901-2015)

Abstract

“Colloquialization,” and anti-colloquial effects such as “densification,” have been shown to shape register change in English, with Australian English showing stronger effects of colloquiality than British English. Parliamentary Hansard records are at the intersection of writing and speech and are subject to various influencing factors possibly leading to change in this register, which we represent in a conceptual model. We apply Biber’s (1988) method of multidimensional analysis to examine the co-occurrence of linguistic features in the British and Australian Hansard over five consecutive time periods. The data provide evidence of shared as well as differentiated effects of colloquialization and densification across the two varieties. The evidence also points to a new type of anti-colloquial trend observed in the parliamentary register, whereby presentation of information appears to be taking the place of a more interactive and interpersonally oriented style, a trend we term “monologization.”

Epicentral effects on ‐ed/‐tinflectional variation in Australasian Englishes 1850–2020

“…It may reflect changes in the editorial style applied to NZE Hansard, but there are no style guides surviving from the 20th‐century Hansard editors. Similar abrupt changes in Hansard style have been found in the usage of you , split infinitives, and contractions (Kruger, van Rooy, & Smith, 2019).…”

“…In the 19th-century data (Table 3) learnt had a slight role as past tense and the alternative active past participle, whereas in Table 5 above it is used almost equally for the past tense and twice as often for the active past participle. Here the NZE data overtake the AusE in usage of -t variant, extending its application and prompting visible changes in usage that seem to be eclipse any previous grammatical (Kruger, van Rooy, & Smith, 2019).…”

Theoretical models and statistical modelling of linguistic epicentres

“…Hopefully, the completion of ongoing corpus compilation projects (Bernaisch, Heller, & Mukherjee, 2021 for South Asian Englishes; Biewer, Bernaisch, Heller, & Berger, 2014 for HKE; Collins, Borlongan, & Yao, 2014 for PhiE; Hoffmann, Sand, & Tan, 2012 for Singapore English (SingE); Kruger, van Rooy, & Smith, 2019 for various Englishes) and already available short‐term BrE and AmE data will ultimately allow us to get more reliable empirical insights into potential epicentral constellations – while controlling for other diachronic processes such as Americanisation, colloquialisation or democratisation (Leech, Hundt, Mair, & Smith, 2009; Baker, 2017) as well as level‐1 contextual predictors as discussed in section 2.3.…”

Parliamentary Hansard records and epicentral influence in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea

“…The earliest studies (Gravlee, 1981;Mollin, 2007;Slembrouck, 1992) tended to focus on issues of reporting and language/discoursal issues within single varieties of English and limited time frames. More recently, several studies have been published that take advantage of the fact that these records of speech-based data are available over relatively long periods of time for several varieties of English (Kotze & van Rooy, 2020;Kruger, van Rooy, & Smith, 2019).…”